


Candyfloss

by frimfram



Category: Mumintroll | Moomins Series - Tove Jansson
Genre: Mermaids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-29 00:14:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14460894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frimfram/pseuds/frimfram
Summary: One time three mermaids tried to eat Snufkin. Oh no!(Avril-circus drew this amazing picture of some mermaids meeting Snufkin and Moomin (http://avril-circus.tumblr.com/post/162908979812/). I assumed the worst.)ETA: Having seen some of the other stuff in these characters’ tags on here, I feel it’s helpful if I confirm at this point that tonally this might not be aimed at kids, but it is also not going to retroactively ruin your childhood or give you anything to tell your therapist).





	Candyfloss

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Water ladies](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/376446) by avril-circus. 



They find him and his friend on a rock in the lagoon, playing shanties on a harmonica and stirring brackish water with bare toes. They know the shanties from five centuries' singing and they know the power of songs themselves to enchant. The harmonica, though, they don't know. The salt air wheezes into it with the creak of a yawing foresail, but when the young man puts it to his mouth what he exhales through it is not just sound but song. They like the song. They like the young man's breath. They like his mouth. They join the song and turn it into something of their own, and with it they take the young man down and down and down.

His eyes are brown and large, and by the time they reach their cave at the umbilicus of the lagoon the eyes are fixed open. With careful hands the mermaids lay his body down among the weed. The only shame is that they don't long stay so fair.

Half-light catches opalescent in their eyes. They draw the soul out and up from his chest in a rising pinkish cloud, winding it round and round their fingers like candyfloss. The three of them press close to take it in, the breath of a world they cannot walk. And, oh. This one has walked. This is a soul singing with birch and pine-needles, astringent as it is with the slap of salt water. This is a soul sprung into life in a firework-burst of love. This is a soul kindled in quiet places, streamed with a reed of thin drawn smoke, blown high on the notes of old songs. This is a soul shaped for the lonely road but suffused with love like warm water.

They do not get the chance to taste it all. While their eyes are closed and their mouths are open a commotion stirs the weed. The friend is there, diving alone, come for the one they took, and though he is much smaller than them he takes them by surprise, pries their treasure from their hands and bursts, burdened arms, for the surface. Their fingers clench empty, and the last glimmer of pink disappears above them in the diffused sparkle of the distant sun.


End file.
